Enfilade

Program for the upcoming Vasi symposium, held in conjunction with the Vasi exhibition:

Una Roma Visuale: New Research on Giuseppe Vasi and the Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Eighteenth-Century Rome
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, 12-13 November 2010

A symposium planned in conjunction with the special exhibition Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour, this two-day event will gather together scholars of national and international reputation, each of whom will present new research on Vasi and eighteenth-century Rome. Sponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center and the Departments of Architecture and Art History, School of Architecture and Allied Arts Organized by the exhibition curators James Harper and James Tice, the symposium will encompass such topics as prints, painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism and cartography in Vasi’s Rome. A guided tour of the exhibition, with the curators, is included in the program.

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Pre-Symposium Presentation (4 p.m.)
Sarah Murray and Molly Taylor-Poleskey (Stanford University), ‘Travelers to Vasi’s Rome: Mapping Eighteenth-Century Mobility’
An introduction to Stanford University’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters” Project’.

Symposium Keynote Lecture (5:30 p.m.)
John Pinto (Princeton University), ‘”The Most Glorious Place in the Universal World”: Architecture and Urbanism in the Rome of Giuseppe Vasi’
This overview of Rome, as defined by architecture, urban design, and city representations in the eighteenth century, addresses the appearance of the papal capital, systematically recorded by Giuseppe Vasi in the Age of the Grand Tour.

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Morning Sessions (9:45 a.m.–12:00 p.m.)
Mario Bevilacqua (Università degli Studi di Firenze), ‘Etched Towns and Architecture: Vasi and Piranesi in the Italian Eighteenth-Century Print World’
Operating within a tradition of architectural illustration, Vasi and Piranesi were both influenced by scholars and intellectuals who promoted print production as visual documents of a decaying cultural heritage. This paper compares and contextualizes their methods of compiling city views, including their use of texts, indexes and maps to summarize and give order and scope to the individual monuments illustrated in their sheets.
Allan Ceen (Director, Studium Urbis, Rome), ‘Vasi and Urban Space’
This paper examines Vasi’s attitude toward public spaces—the streets and piazzas that appear throughout his Magnificenze—to reveal the artist’s concept of the living city as an urban whole and not merely a collection of discrete monuments.
Katherine Rinne (California College of the Arts, Oakland), ‘The Tiber’s Flow in Mid-Eighteenth Century Rome’
In mid-eighteenth century Rome the Tiber was still the lifeblood of the city, as it had been in antiquity. It was also a site of experimentation, scientific investigation, and the display of wealth, as revealed in the maps and vedute of Vasi and other artists and engineers of his time.

Afternoon Sessions (1:20-4:20 p.m.)
Heather Hyde Minor (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), ‘Piranesi’s Lost City’
This talk will illuminate the precise nature of the scholarly and artistic practices that were used to create Piranesi’s great map of Rome, the “Ichnographiam Campi Martii antiquae urbis,” which appeared in his 1762 book Il Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma (The Campus Martius of Ancient Rome), accompanied by a sixty-seven page essay and forty-eight figural prints.
Jessica Maier (University of Oregon), ‘Giuseppe Vasi as Cartographer: Influence and Innovation in Early Modern Maps of Rome’
Vasi’s 1778 map of Rome tends to be regarded as derivative by scholars of early modern cartography, overshadowed as it is by the radical innovation of Nolli’s Grande Pianta (1748). This talk proposes a reevaluation of Vasi’s map in light of the practice of cartography in the eighteenth century, when “borrowing” was commonplace and originality a relative term.
Susan Dixon (University of Tulsa), ‘Vasi and Arcadia’
In the 1740s through the 1760s, the Accademia degli Arcadi flourished in Rome, serving as a neutral landscape in which those interested in restoring Italian culture to a position of supremacy gathered to listen to poetic recitations. Those with intense political, theological and social differences flocked pacifically enough to the Bosco Parrasio, the Arcadians’ garden. Vasi found patrons and supporters in Arcadia to help him create the Magnificenze di Roma, among other works.
John Moore (Smith College), ‘Giuseppe Vasi’s “Prospetto dell’Alma Città di Roma”’
First published in December 1765, Vasi’s enormous etched panorama of Rome went together with a guidebook in which one expression unexpectedly provoked complaints from the papal authorities. The resolution of this matter casts light on the diplomatic relationships among the courts of Rome, Naples, and Madrid.

A guided tour of the exhibition with its curators follows at 4:20 p.m.